This morning we were commenting the unpleasant news of the illness of one of the most beloved people in the world of free software. Luckily, it seems that the prognosis is good and, Since the greats must be honored in life, we are going to do a brief biography of Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman or RMS, as he is often mentioned, born March 16, 1953 in New York City. Since for some reason the biographies point out the fact that his family was of Jewish descent, we will mention that detail without fully understanding its importance.
Brief biography of Richard Stallman
His childhood and adolescence were typical of nerdy movie kids. His first contact with the world of computers was at a summer camp where he spent time reading the IBM 7094 manuals. This was a high-performance machine intended for scientific and technological applications. It was capable of floating point and fixed point operations and its basic machine cycle was 2 microseconds. Its word size of 36 fixed bits and several registers for arithmetic, logic and input and output operations with more than 180 instructions available.
As you can see, it's not your typical preteen summer read. Later, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen He spent his years in a high school program at Columbia University and volunteered in the biology department. from Rockefeller University.
His first programs
I was still in high school when was hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center. The seventeen-year-old had to write a numerical analysis program for the Fortran programming language. RMS hated that language and after finishing the job, which took a couple of weeks, he swore never to touch it again. He spent the rest of the vacation writing a text editor for the APL language and a processor for the PL/1 language.
The university years
In 1970 he entered Harvard University where he excelled in Mathematics. THe also began working as a programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In those years Stallman came into contact with the hacker community where he was known by his initials that he used in his messaging accounts.
In 1974 he graduated in Physics with honors and, although he considered continuing at the institution (Harvard), he preferred to do his doctorate at MIT. After a year he would abandon it to focus on his work as a programmer in the artificial intelligence laboratory.
As a research assistant, he published a paper on the bactracking problem that was pioneering and decades later was still considered the best solution. Backtracking is a way of incrementally building a solution by trying different solutions at each step and turning back when a deadlock is reached or restrictions are violated.
He also did not neglect his role as a hacker. working on projects for the Incompatible Time Sharing System or ITS.
ITS was one of the first time-sharing operating systems developed by MIT for the DEC PDP-6 and later migrated to the PDP-10. Its name was one of the usual jokes in the hacker world; MIT's previous operating system was the Compatible Time Sharing System.
Stallman's other works were operating systems for Lisp machines, one of which came to market in the following decade.
The beginning of the end
Stallman didn't get along with his parents and probably wasn't popular at school either. Years later he would say that Harvard University was his first home. That feeling remained (Or intensified when arriving at the MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory where he found an open-door culture where information was shared and everyone had access to the equipment they needed.
In the next article we will see how the change in that open culture launched the free software movement.